Hackathon Prototype

[Jarvarious Hunsaker]

Immediately, the founders decided to throw all the additional functionality out of the app away, except for the photos and related features.

Instagram has quickly become the #1 photo app and has been growing exponentially ever since.

A Garage48 Hackathon is a 48-hour intense weekend marathon, where up to 150 participants gather in a big room and pitch about 20 to 30 ideas on stage, with the aim for turning those ideas into viable prototypes.

Our hackathons are shaped around diverse focus points varying from theme-based ones with IT skillset requirements, to MAKE-ATHON events where the main focus is on creating physical objects instead of IT-based prototypes (e.g. Wood, Hardware & Arts series, Defence etc.).

Garage48 loves organizing corporate workshops, ideations, design sprints and hackathons. Why? Because we have witnessed so many great initiatives and changes actually implemented within the company and this is the greatest reward to us.

We have organized ideations, bootcamps, hackathons and acceleration programs for companies like Telia, Tele2, SEB, Nordic Investment Bank, Bolt, Johnson&Johnson, Novo Nordisk, Janssen and Coca Cola to name a few.

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Online public hackathons where participants from anywhere can join. Sites like devpost.com to a fantastic job of handling all the logistics and infrastructure required to host public (or internal) hackathons. In-person public hackathons where anyone can join but they have to be in a physical location during the event Internal hackathons where a company or organization hosts an event. In my experience, these are often conducted in a hybrid model: teams can be in-person or remote and rely on video conferencing tools to work as a team.

But, hackathons are not the solution to everything. If you are looking at running a successful hackathon, take the time to really identify the goals and motivations. Make sure the hackathon is the right strategy. If it is, fantastic! You will have a blast. If it is not, help the rest of the organization understand why, and give them alternative options that better suit your goals.

Hackathons are amazing events where developers, designers and thinkers can come together to build an awesome prototype product within a specified time period. If you're familiar with this blog, you probably know that I like to participate in hackathons and then write about my experiences here.

Hello everyone, in this article, I want to share my learnings and how I managed to participate in 3 hackathons in a row without stopping for 3 months (June-September). At the end of this article, I have answered some FAQs that some of my readers have asked me about hackathons.

In the 48-hour hackathon, I allocated a huge chunk of time to concentrate on the project and therefore, procrastinate less. The prototype was completed early, and my team was super elated to win! Read about the experience here.

On the other hand, for the 2-week and the 8-week hackathons, I thought I paced myself well but looking back, ended up procrastinating a lot. We created a Discord server to communicate but as seen in the screenshot below, we added an insane amount of random channels and procrastinated so much in the first weeks.

When the deadline was near, only then my team and I started to work hard to complete on time. This is the Parkinson's Law at work, where increasingly complex work relatively induce procrastination according to the amount of time available.

Going non-stop in 3 hackathons, I learned that productivity is like running a marathon, you can't sprint too fast, and you can't saunter either. You need to know how much you can do per day and set milestones.

To overcome the effects of Parkinson's Law, my team use a simple app like Todoist to allocate and assign our tickets. But because there were no milestones set, it was easy to get sidetracked. We slowly figured out that the best way is to set up weekly meetings to discuss our milestones and ensure everyone stays on the same page.

I find that it also helps the developers in the team to focus on functionality over visuals first, as the designers can take care of that. By sketching the overall architecture of the idea, it also becomes much easier to streamline the process for both the design and development team.

When I participated in these hackathons, I found myself spending so much time on the hackathon that I could hardly manage my weekly blog schedule. My blog draft count has shrunken considerably, since these 3 hackathons are non-stop for the period from June to September.

As a result, I postponed or declined many social activities because of hackathons. It snowballed into reduced sleep hours/quality and poorer lifestyle habits. Despite that, I think I managed my time pretty well and in the process, I learned to understand my team member have commitments too and assign fair work for them.

As the leader, I tried to set clear expectations and be realistic about them because sometimes, it is not possible to have a fully polished app ready. I would rather have a decent prototype completed than having a very polished app but with our team members getting burnout, because I pushed them over their limits.

Every hackathon team is like a small and elite project team at work. When we talk about the project, we stay professional, even among friends. We follow good communication practices, respect different opinions in coding style, art style, work style, etc.

In many cases, your hackathon team members are initially strangers to you. So I tried to talk about random things besides the project because it is easier to work with people you like, and it helps build team rapport.

Of course, while having these random conversations are great for team bonding, we can sometimes get too carried away that nothing gets done. In the beginning, I was not a very responsible leader (I have to admit) and so these hackathons taught me to stay disciplined and keep everyone motivated till the very last day.

Frankly, it was a long and tough experience to be doing these hackathons without rest. But the rewards of learning and meeting new friends makes this an unforgettable and meaningful personal growth experience in 2021.

I remembered September 5, that was the day my long 3-months of back-to-back hackathon marathon ended. That day, I submitted our work as team leader, did all the admin-related requirements and went straight to bed. It was 2pm. I woke up 6pm, ate dinner then went to bed again at 8pm. I never slept more than 5 hours in 3 months and it felt so great.

Hackathons are truly inspiring experiences and if you have never participated in hackathons before, I highly encourage you to try. There are many virtual hackathons around and I like to check out devpost.com to browse upcoming ones. Also, please feel free to read the FAQs section below from questions asked by fellow readers.

Thank you for reading this rather personal and long article. I'd like to conclude this article by thanking every team member that I worked with in these 3 hackathons. They are dedicated, passionate and amazing individuals who I am sure will rise to new heights in their respective industries. Cheers!

Yes sometimes, but it is not because of the hackathon itself. It is because of me not finding the right balance to incorporate it into my routine. I feel that my burnouts are more prominent in longer hackathons, as I have to be consistent in making time for it in my routine while not neglecting other commitments for a longer period of time.

In hackathons, burnouts can happen when you realized that you're doing most of the work and not getting enough sleep. Hence, it is important to communicate to your team if you're starting to feel burnout. Ask the team leader to re-allocate tasks or re-assign deadlines to make sure your burnout is reduced.

Second is the theme. Is it a game hackathon, machine learning hackathon or mobile app hackathon? What kind of technologies are you required to use? What are the deliverables? It is better to stick with a hackathon that has a theme you're passionate about. It can keep you motivated from the start.

Then, other factors such as the hackathon's location/timezone, the type of people you will form teams with, etc. will all come into mind. Decide if you want to go solo or in a team. In my opinion, I prefer working with teams, as I always learn more with others than working by myself.

Not all team members have to be programmers. This usually depends on the goal of the hackathon. If the objective is to build a complete app, then you can think about having more programmers in your team. Else, if the goal is a simple prototype and the idea presentation or the concept design matters more, then aim to diversify to get inspired from different perspectives. I have met designers, entrepreneurs and marketers in hackathons before. They can all bring something of value to the table when building and designing a prototype.

One of the core principles that guides Cloudera and everything we do is a commitment to the open source community. As the entire Cloudera Data Platform is built on open source projects, we find it crucial to participate in and contribute back to the community. Applied ML prototypes are one of the ways that we accomplish this.

Applied ML Prototypes (AMPs) are fully built end-to-end data science solutions that allow data scientists to go from an idea to a fully working machine learning model in a fraction of the time. AMPs provide an end-to-end framework for building, deploying, and monitoring business-ready ML applications instantly. AMPs are available to deploy with a single click in Cloudera Machine Learning (CML), but every AMP is also available to the public as a public GitHub repository.

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